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Anders Lindegaard to Man Utd

There was some frantic googling done yesterday afternoon after news broke that Man Utd were planning to sign Danish goalkeeper, Anders Lindegaard. It didn’t help that we did a lot of this searching under the assumption he’s planning in Denmark when in fact he’s move the move north to the Norwegian top flight. ‘The new Peter Schmeichel’ you say. ‘Middling career in Norway is a sign of real quality, eh?’ It’s not looking good.

To be frank, we know very little about him. If Fergie was going to opt for a young Danish keeper, we would have recommended Jonas Lossl, a keeper we’ve heaped much praise on in the past. To his credit, Lindegaard does a handful of Danish caps to his name, but all that we can deduce from that is he’s slightly better than Thomas Sorensen and little else. Just because he’s the Danish number 1 doesn’t bestow him with any superhuman powers.

It’s times like this that we could use the opinion of a Danish Man Utd goalkeeping legend and right on cue, Peter Schmeichel has piped up. Speaking to the Guardian, he revealed he doesn’t think Lindegaard is good enough to be United’s first choice.

We are talking about Manchester United here. You can look at talent, you can look at young good players, [but] you don’t want that, you want someone who can go in straight away and give performances in 80% of the games that the number one choice goalkeeper will play for Manchester United.

That would seem to tally with our rather more ill-informed and stomach based gut instinct. Our best guess is Van der Sar is retiring and it’s dawned on Tomasz Kuszczak he won’t be getting the promotion so Lindegaard is being brought in as mainly a bench-warmer/Carling Cup starter and the pursuit of David de Gea will continue for several months to come.